Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  Before the situation could escalate any further, there was movement behind them as the others crowded forward.

  “Beckett?” she called back, her eyes still on MacDonald.

  “Right here,” he answered.

  “Good. Let’s wrap this up.”

  Behind them there was a giant explosion that rocked the whole cavern. Chunks of ice cracked off of the walls and ceiling. Dust and chips rained down on them as they fought to steady themselves. As Rodrigo had expected, the pirate attackers had dropped explosives into the hole to try and get whoever was left. They would soon follow.

  These were good pirates.

  No more screwing around.

  Bell had been armed with two incendiary grenades. It was pretty close quarters for those little jewels, but they didn’t have much time before they were squeezed. She also found three proximity mines in Bell’s pack and handed one to Icknor.

  “Go back and set this at the mouth of the tunnel. I want it far enough away so that they won’t set it off just by coming down the chute. It’s a fucking waste if we just get one of them.”

  Icknor nodded and moved off.

  “Hit the deck,” she whispered to the squad as she pulled the fuse on an incendiary grenade. Then she tossed it into the faint glow ahead of them and hit the deck herself. There was another huge explosion and the tunnel in front of them burst into flame. The icy cold turned to inferno in an instant. The soldiers of the Titan pressed their prostrate bodies into the wall as the heat blanketed them, wilting their protective gear and clothing. It took only a moment for the whole conflagration to die down. The squad was rattled but unharmed. Cummings, in particular, hated incendiary grenades. Even the idea of using them on an enemy gave him the shakes.

  Rodrigo was the first on her feet, rushing forward into the larger chamber, determined to kill whatever hadn’t been burnt. She needn’t have been in such a rush. The room was a large stakeout room. It was defensible to an extent, fortified emplacements in four positions along the walls and a cannon that was concealed from view if you were in the passage, but right there facing you as soon as you stepped into the room. There had been seven men in the room, all heavily armed, all ready for anything. Anything, that is, except a burst of flame. The smell burned worse than the flames had. What kind of maniac would use an incendiary grenade in close quarters?

  These men had clearly never heard of Anabelle Rodrigo.

  “Enemy behind us!” Alraune shouted.

  What the hell?

  That proximity mine was meant to be a warning as much as it was meant to take out the enemy. Either they had managed to defuse it or they had tripped it during the explosion. Of course, there was always the possibility that Icknor had botched the job. That, though, was unlikely. No one botched jobs under Rodrigo’s command. It was unhealthy.

  “Fall back!” she called out

  They could all turn and fight but she was sure they weren’t completely clear ahead. There were two more passages shooting out of the room. Their entrances were on either wall, dug out between each pair of emplacements. When Beckett appeared, she showed him the cannon. It was scorched but not melted. The barrel looked intact and they could only pray about the trigger. The piece that allowed it to swivel had been fused into one ball of solid metal making it useless against any approach but from the front.

  “Which way?” Beckett asked, indicating the side passages.

  “Neither.” She put Alraune, MacDonald, Icknor, and Cummings into gun emplacements while she and Beckett dragged Knudson back behind the cannon. Bell had been left behind. They would recover her body later. Rodrigo took two flash bombs and two grenades from Bell’s pack and stashed them into the pockets of her parka. She gave two more of each to Beckett.

  The cannon was computer operated and she had about seven seconds to figure out how to operate it. A lifetime would never have been enough so she hefted her rifle, checked the clip, and balanced it over the shield. Beckett got right to work on trying to crack the cannon’s code.

  “Forget it,” Rodrigo ordered sourly. “How many pirates are there?”

  He thought a moment. “Four or five. Six at most. We hit back pretty hard.”

  Even odds. She ordered him to line up his gun the way she had. “You stay the fuck out of harm’s way,” she said to him.

  Beckett furrowed his brow at the remark. How were you supposed to stay out of harm’s way when you were infantry in combat?

  They waited. Knudson was on the floor moaning softly to himself. There was pain in those sounds but more than that there was anger. The upper body wound was preventing him from firing a gun which left him feeling helpless, like a child in the care of adults. Alraune had a heavy rifle balanced on her shoulder, sticking out of the gun emplacements. She was just a baby, Alraune, but she was hard and callous. And she was a good shot, getting better. On the opposite side, to counter balance her, was Cummings. Cummings held two hand guns, one in each hand. For him, a rifle was out of the question. He was an expert with a pistol and had been since the age of nine. The power of a rifle was no good if you missed. With a pistol, Cummings never missed. MacDonald chewed on his lower lip, something simmering beneath the surface. Rodrigo worried about him. Icknor was still trembling a bit. He didn’t like being holed up in a place where so many had just been burned to death. What if the pirates had the same idea?

  But they were an ambush party, which meant they were traveling light and were armed with weapons designed to be more accurate than powerful. If they had any explosives at all, it would be a grenade on a belt. The shields in each area, as scorched and melted as they were, would protect them from the worst of a grenade.

  The first pirate came through in a spray of bullets. They were each tempted to duck down, but the shields did the job. Alraune, supported only by her own two feet, took aim and fired. The pirate did a little dance before being smacked to the ground by the force of the bullets. Two more pirates filed in behind the first. The lead was firing while the rear slipped off to the side. He did not have a gun. Instead, he found his way around the side of the nearest emplacement and grappled with Alraune. He had a long serrated knife. To her credit, Alraune gritted her teeth and pushed into hand to hand with no fear. She was outweighed and overmatched. She was the most incompetent brawler Rodrigo had ever met in the UESF.

  “Cummings!”

  The little man changed his aim and fired with his right hand. He missed Alraune by a hairsbreadth, taking the pirate in the only exposed portion of his body, his shoulder. At first there was no effect. Then the pirate noticed the blood trickling down his arm and realized he’d been shot. He must have been more shocked than anything else. After all, what kind of a maniac would fire into hand to hand combat? But Rodrigo and her bunch were a group of very particular kinds of maniacs.

  Icknor pushed forward to aid Alraune, knowing that Cummings wasn’t going to get another shot. As he moved, more pirates came from the passage extending away on his side. He was tackled by a burly throwback, earring and all, who’d stripped away his cold weather gear so that he could maneuver better.

  With a howling curse, Rodrigo detached herself from behind the cannon and charged forward. MacDonald had flipped around to cover the last tunnel and he was firing so there was action on that side as well. Trapped rats. Here, it became necessary for Anabelle Rodrigo to demonstrate what made her the best in the business. Her eyes and ears took in the whole scene and graphed out a schematic inside of her head. There was one pirate still firing his weapon. Another was wounded, but still on the offensive against Alraune. Two more were coming in from the back entrance. Two had come from Icknor’s side. One of them had grabbed him and another was coming around the melee with a weapon. MacDonald was firing into the last passage. She had no count on the number of enemies there. She doubted as if MacDonald did either.

  Her first priority was to take out the firing pirate. His attention was elsewhere but she couldn’t blame him. It was difficult to defend in so crowded and small a roo
m. If someone had come after her, she’d probably have been caught off guard, too. She cracked his goggles with the butt of her rifle and pulled his feet out from under him. When he was down, scrambling to recover, she pulled a flash bomb out of her pocket, tripped the fuse, and dropped it to the ground.

  “Flash!” she cried out, throwing both arms over her eyes. It seemed unlikely that any of her squad had heard her warning but if the pirates were blinded, it wouldn’t matter. The darkness behind her arms glowed blue white, the flash reflecting off of her gear. It lasted only an instant and then she was moving again. Of everyone in the room, only MacDonald wasn’t temporarily blinded. He was up against a wall changing his clip when she opened her eyes. Then he slid back around into the open, firing again into the corridor. There was no return fire so he had either killed them all or they were taking cover.

  Icknor and his new playmate were still grappling, as were Alraune and hers. The pirate on the floor was groping around for a weapon. The other two that had come through were frozen in place, guns out, wondering whether or not they should just open fire on the room. Rodrigo took them both down before they could even see spots. Then she dealt with the one on the ground at her feet. With all of the shooters gone, it was easy to use her knife on those that had closed on Icknor and Alraune. She went to Alraune first because she was the most likely to falter in a straight fight. Icknor could hold his own, even against an opponent of such size. When it was all over, five pirates lay dead on the floor and MacDonald had stopped shooting. The air was warm and damp, the walls beginning to melt around them.

  “How many did you get MacDonald?”

  “Beats hell out of me.”

  Beckett was kneeling by Knudson. “He’s passed out.”

  They were wounded, but not as badly as the pirates. Even if they’d been falling apart, they wouldn’t have been able to go back. They needed to find the other entrance to the hideout. They needed to expedite the process.

  Rodrigo ordered Beckett, Alraune, and Cummings down into the far tunnel while she took MacDonald to inspect his handiwork. She didn’t want him out of her sight. Icknor was to recover Bell and remain with her and Knudson.

  For all of MacDonald’s shooting, there were only three men at the end of the corridor. Two were dead and one was dying. They put him out of his misery and continued on. Rodrigo was concerned as it wound around to the right, but it eventually came back left which was the direction in which they wanted to go. She expected two more main rooms, one for storage and one for control, with a scattering of barracks. Now that they weren’t busy fighting for their lives, she could see where the pirates had burrowed into the rock to place lights and heating filaments. It wasn’t warm in the tunnels, but it wasn’t frigid either. Their slow progress uncovered a number of ambush points, none of which were occupied. That was a good sign. There was no sign of any barracks. At last, they could see the end of the passageway as it opened up into a large room. At the far end of the room, they could just barely make out another entrance. With a little luck, Beckett and his group would approach from that end.

  Taking the second flash bomb from her pocket, Rodrigo tripped the fuse and tossed it into the room. She and MacDonald turned away, counted off, and then charged. Inside they found two blinded men, firing wildly. A third was behind them and groping for the handle of a door that was set into the wall on the right. Rodrigo took down the two armed men. MacDonald took a shot at the third just as he found the door and hit him in the shoulder. The pirate fell through the opening door and into the room beyond. They charged after him.

  The outer room was storage. They barely caught a glimpse of foodstuffs and blankets in addition to whatever had been looted from unfortunate ships. The second room was the control room. It was smaller with a square table and some wooden chairs. There was a second battered table against the wall and two computers wired up to batteries. Other batteries were stacked against the wall. The pirate was busy erasing the hard drives when the two soldiers burst in. He turned and raised his good arm, the wounded one hanging loosely at his side.

  “Please…” he choked before MacDonald opened fire on him. The shot wasn’t meant to kill. The pirate was hit in his good shoulder and spun away from the computers. Rodrigo did nothing. Though MacDonald’s shot hadn’t been at all necessary, it wasn’t completely unwarranted. Only when he fired again, this time blowing apart the pirate’s kneecap, did Rodrigo bark a cease fire order at him.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she said.

  He didn’t answer. He leveled his weapon again and this time Rodrigo knocked him aside. The weeping pirate didn’t even notice.

  “What the fuck?” MacDonald spat at her. “These bastards killed Bell.”

  Rodrigo felt her blood boiling. There'd been a lot of killing in the last few minutes, but all of it necessary. As her team had become more battered and wounded, she had decided that any encumbrance, such as prisoners, would be a liability. This, though, was the last pirate. MacDonald was trying to exact revenge.

  “You stand down,” she told him quietly, menacingly.

  “Fuck you, sarge.” With that, he turned his weapon on the pirate one more time and finished the job.

  Shocked, Rodrigo stood by and did nothing as he walked out.

  Seconds later, Beckett came in. “What happened?” he asked, then stopped up short. He saw the dead pirate on the floor and no weapon. He saw the multiple wounds. He looked up at Rodrigo. “Is that it?”

  She didn’t answer at first, didn’t even realize how it appeared to the young soldier.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Did you find the way out?”

  He nodded.

  “Is the place secure?”

  “Ghost town.”

  “Get to the surface and signal the captain. There won’t be any arrests.”

  Rodrigo - Reprise

  As she drank her silent beer, Rodrigo wondered about the days that were ahead of her more than the days behind. She had never been a pensive person but her status in life was beginning to take its toll on her emotional state. Cummings could be goofy forever. MacDonald could be a shit. What was deep inside Rodrigo was dying and she was trying desperately to save it. But those bastards in the Admiralty wanted a different kind of Space Force. This new era would have no place for an old soldier like Anabelle Rodrigo. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t have any room for a space cowboy like Ted Beckett, either.

  To Ted Beckett, she toasted silently. The finest captain the fleet has ever known. I’ll miss you.

  Cabrera

  When Doctor Samantha Cabrera received the news of her promotion she got weak in the knees. The idea of a promotion was exhilarating and it had come about a year earlier than she had expected. She had only been a lieutenant for eight months. In that time, she had served aboard the Valor under the immediate guidance of Dr. Paul Royce and the command of Ted Beckett. She had never understood why the Admiralty had put her on the Valor. It was a ship where they sent rookies to have a trial by fire or wash-outs to torture the rookies. She was, at that point, neither a rookie nor a wash-out.

  Cabrera was thirty four years old. She’d enlisted in the service a bit later than most, choosing to change her life and her career at the age of twenty six. After her schooling, she had come into the world almost completely burned out. She had hoped that practicing in a hospital would have rejuvenated her, given her back that zest for being a doctor, but it hadn’t. Instead, the long hours and sad cases had only served to beat her down even further. Being on call at the hospital for two or three days at a time was awful. Even when she slept, it was on an uncomfortable cot or on a gurney. She had the sense of never being at home and at peace. It may seem that enlisting in the service would only exacerbate the problem, but Cabrera’s logic was different. If she was assigned as a doctor aboard a space ship then she would be at work and at home at the same time. When she’d enlisted, she hadn’t been thinking of family. Her roots had dissolved while she’d been in med school. Her father had di
ed and her mother had lost her mind. She had an older sister somewhere but hadn’t heard from her since her teen years.

  Cabrera had been half right about military service. She had been expecting order and discipline to the nth degree. In basic training, you got it. Once you were assigned a ship, you met and worked with real people. There was still military protocol to be maintained, but you could call someone by his or her first name when you weren’t on duty. There was plenty for her to do. People got sick out in space all the time. Fuzzy heads and runny noses. Pulsing brains and watery eyes. Nausea. Then there were the missions. Whenever the infantry went out she steeled herself for real wounds. In eight years she’d had to sew up all kinds of cuts and set all kinds of breaks. On three occasions, she’d been called on to perform emergency surgery. Two out of three of those times she had saved a life. She didn’t like to think about the third time. Her own personality seemed to mesh well with the system. Superiors and subordinates alike seemed to get along with her. On the Valor, she bunked with the first officer. Promotion had come slowly but easily. She thought she might have gone farther if she pushed for it, but rank was not her goal. Satisfaction was. Now, though, it seemed that rank was going to follow along.

  She’d called Paul Royce right away. After all, if she was being promoted that meant that he was being transferred. He wouldn’t talk about it, convinced that the Admiralty had finally decided to force him out. No one got transferred off the Valor. Well, not the wash-outs anyway. He’d called her back a while later to tell her that he had been assigned to the Noble and it was all very weird. Very weird. That was all he’d had to say.

  What she hadn’t told him was that she had requested a transfer. Despite the fact that she’d never felt she belonged on the Valor, she found that the environment, for a variety of reasons, was becoming very uncomfortable. All of the officers had expressed their distaste at having a medical person as their lieutenant. Only Captain Beckett had initially shown indifference, but she could tell that it didn’t suit him either. Ships needed a doctor as a Medical Officer. They needed a competent medical staff. But captains liked to dump a lot of responsibility onto their lieutenants and couldn’t do so when the lieutenant was a doctor. Doctors had enough responsibility without the hazing that comes before being promoted into the Officers’ Club.